I tried a 2012 base model macbook air and liked it enough to do a BTO with 256G SSD and 8G ram. Now my base model is running perfectly and I was wondering...

Can I clone the Base model to an external drive and then clone that on to the new machine? I can always reinstall everything on the new one but I was wondering...

Yes, I just use Disk Utility from the recovery partition to do this (with the move to the recovery partition you can't clone it while booted into OSX on that drive).

In DU select the Restore tab, drag the partition that OSX is on currently into the Source box and the partition of the drive you want it backed up to into the Destination box. Once that's done, you will have a bootable copy that you should be able to use or restore back to the new machine.

**Do keep in mind that I think you might be required to put in serials for products like MS Office for some reason, but not all of them (or has been my experience). That new computer's components, IDs, Mac address, etc seem to trigger these I think.